Presidential Campaign

Presidential Campaign

By Bruce N. Gyory, political consultant and adjunct professor, University of Albany

If you believe the likely voter polls, President Obama has hit a wall at 48 percent. Therefore, Governor Romney would narrowly win the popular vote, with the Electoral College a narrow tightrope walk away from a Romney presidency. However, if you believe the registered voter polls, it is Romney who hits a ceiling of 47 percent, enabling Obama to win both the popular vote and re-election in the Electoral College.

Home Depot did it. RIM, E*Trade, and Best Buy did it, too. So did Hewlett Packard and AIG. At companies of all shapes and sizes all over the world, chief executive officers are fired for bad decisions or poor performance. Should the standards be different for the world’s most powerful and prominent CEO?

The President of the United States is the CEO of our federal government. He’s in charge of executive branch departments and agencies. The president sets policy, and with Congress, guides the vision of government, and is entrusted with America’s national security.

Just like the CEO of a major corporation, the person occupying the Oval Office must present a vision, propose policy initiatives to meet goals, achieve buy-in from stakeholders, and demonstrate results. But over the last four years, President Obama has failed to meet most of his own benchmarks, let alone those of the nation.

How will the hurricane influence the election? The conventional wisdom holds that power outages, interrupted work schedules and other factors in the storm’s aftermath could depress turnout and hurt President Obama’s chances, including in swing states like Virginia and New Hampshire. Under this scenario, Sandy would end up a net plus for Romney.

But aside from sheer logistics, how does the storm fit into or alter the narrative that’s been established during the campaign? Natural disasters are normally seen as emergencies where government relief and aid are not only necessary, but deeply valued. Such emergencies demonstrate a core government role, bringing water, food, shelter, power and safety to those who have been afflicted through no fault of their own.

The electoral college is like the infield fly rule in baseball. Only when it matters do we pay attention to the way it works. From 1888, when Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but defeated President Grover Cleveland in the electoral college, until 2000, hardly any American thought too much about how we actually elect a president. Then George Bush pulled a Harrison, and beat Al Gore on points.

With polls showing the presidential race to be dead even, Mitt Romney would do well to remind voters in key swing states of his position on social issues like marriage, life and religious liberty. They could tip the scale in this election.

The Karl Rove wing of the GOP and the Republican elite have succeeded in keeping social issues off the table in this general election, deeming them to be “divisive.” They’ve understandably focused their campaign on the Obama record, especially as it relates to the economy. But Obama also has a record on social issues, and that record puts him at odds with a large majority of voters in key swing states. Unfortunately, voters in those states haven’t heard much about the Obama record on marriage, life and religious liberty, and Romney himself hasn’t done much to make these issues a central part of his messaging. This is a key strategic mistake that he should remedy while he still has the chance.

I was very disappointed to read Stephen Schneck’s recent column, which questioned Mitt Romney’s morals on the basis of his plan to return control of our nation’s Medicaid program to the states. Not only was his column extraordinarily misleading, but it was insulting to me as a fellow Catholic.

To be clear, I share Mr. Schneck’s commitment to serving others; after all, our faith does call us to care for “the least of these.” The difference, however, is that I fulfill my responsibility by tithing, volunteering in my community and supporting privately funded charitable organizations; I don’t believe it’s the government’s role to fulfill our responsibilities as Catholics for us.

There's an evangelical pastor in Washington, DC, Jim Wallis, who said something that has always stuck with me: we don't need to go further to the left, we don't need to go further to the right, we all just need to go deeper.

With less than two weeks remaining until Election Day, I'd like to ask you to do something radical: STOP. That's right - just stop. A pretty uncommon ask from a politician, eh? Politicians are usually asking us to DO something. I'm asking you to take a few minutes and just stop.

By James Harrigan, Utah State University and Antony Davies, Duquesne University

With less than two weeks until the election, President Obama has finally released his second term economic plan. His 11-page booklet, The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs and Middle Class Security, at once manages to use every campaign buzzword and to answer Mitt Romney’s criticism that there is not, and has never been, a coherent Obama economic plan.

By Melanie Sloan, executive director, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)

So far this month, the American Action Network (AAN) has poured more than $10 million into ad buys in six congressional districts — part of a last-minute October spending dump explicitly aimed at preserving the Republican majority in the House this election season. AAN is a non-profit, organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. What this means is the group doesn’t have to reveal its donors, or their hidden agendas, and voters have no idea where the $10 million being spent to influence their votes is coming from. It’s clear, though, that at least some of it is coming from publicly traded companies whose leaders want shareholders and customers kept in the dark about their political spending.

Presidential debates are known to be little more than televised political theater, and that’s in part why we watch them. However, perhaps at no point would it have been more important for both candidates to skip the theatrics than during this debate cycle - at a time when rising energy prices are leaving a dent in Americans’ wallets already strained by an economy that has been lagging for months.